Nat Geo later clarified why its June edition wasn't delivered in a paper bag.

National Geographic magazine's cover for June 2018 featuring a plastic bag partially submerged in water had gone viral on social media after a senior editor shared the illustration on Twitter.

With many calling the cover "brilliant" and "thought-provoking", the illustration showed a plastic bag resembling an iceberg, suggesting that the world’s plastic pollution is “just the tip of the iceberg”.

Titled "Planet or Plastic?" the Nat Geo cover referred to the usage of plastic around the world and the threat it posed to our environment.

Image credits: National Geographic / Facebook

The magazine’s senior photo editor Vaughn Wallace tweeted the cover last month and called it “one for the ages”.

When a Twitter user-- @sammy7000 pointed out the irony in the packaging of the magazine-- that always comes with a plastic wrapper-- the Nat Geo editor Wallace, in an interview with Greenpeace Ocean's campaigner Lousie Edge, assured that the magazine will do away with the plastic wrapper and use paper for the purpose instead.

Starting with this June issue, we've gotten rid of the plastic wrapper and replaced it with paper. — Vaughn Wallace (@vaughnwallace) May 16, 2018

But when Luiz Rocha, who goes by the Twitter handle @CoralReefFish ordered the celebrated edition, nothing had changed in the packaging. The Twitter user shared a photo of the magazine delivered not in one but two layers of plastic wrapping.

"Humanity in a nutshell, the @NatGeo magazine about ocean plastic pollution comes wrapped in a plastic bag inside another plastic bag. Photo Roger Bassetto," Rocha wrote on his Twitter page.

This edition was the first Nat Geo in America to come wrapped in paper instead of plastic. Maybe this is a location thing. Maybe something happened to the original wrapper during shipping. Here’s mine: pic.twitter.com/hM70ryZJ4b